[Freeciv] thoughts on stopping smallpox (long)

[Chris Moseley <chris.moseley@xxxxxxxxxx>]

My thoughts on making smallpox unviable centre more on minor tweaks
than wholesale reformation.

My feeling is that bureaucracy might be the best way to avoid ICS,
although I definitely like randomness as a way to break scripted
humans, I mean "certainty-based strategies". It would be good if we
had a few more options there, and costing things on a gaussian curve
is not too hard (add two random numbers instead of using only one, for
instance), those who dislike it can simply set "randomness=0" on
whatever they like. Possible candidates: build cost, food required for
growth, advance cost, unit movement, unit/city defections, diplomacy.

Does anyone play with non-random combat, out of curiosity? Or does
dislike of randomness only go so far?

With the food/growth question, I wonder whether the "food box" idea
might be backwards. In reality a small village of, say, 10000 people
(a Civ size 1) will take roughly seven generations to get an extra
10000 people, or 150-200 years (doubling in size), while a city of
100000 people will take only one generation to add 10000 people (a 10%
increase), or about 25 years. In that respect a constant size food box
is "more realistic". We also get science effects, however. The live
birth rate measured at age 3 drops precipitously as the likelihood of
survival to adulthood increases. Perhaps adding disease and having
sanitation affect that might help. Either as in Civ-CTP wher the birth
rate rises, or as a disease model where there is a base rate
determined by technology, mediated by building improvements in each
city. Scaling is also bad - it annoys me that a settler that cost me
1000000 population to build only makes a new city of size 10000.
That's not realistic!

Disease might allow an effective stepped limit on city size through
the ages. But perhaps allowing settlers to be added to any size city
would be necessary to mitigate that effect and allow some larger
cities. Mimicking migration?

One other thing might be to further limit where trade from smaller
towns goes, perhaps by making it proportional to what the workers are
doing. That way a city with less than 5 population will put all its
gold towards building improvements, while a larger city can have a
scientist who therefore produces research as well. Might stagnate the
game at the start, but it would be interesting to try, IMO. Perhaps
code it as a percentage effect to make for easy tweaking and
disabling.

Bobby Bryant
> I think that's what he was getting at.  If you can "win" the 
> game using a canned strategy that only touches on 5% of the 
> features of the game, what are the other 95% of the features 
> there for?

Count me as never playing multiplayer for that reason. I know I can
win playing what I now learn is called ICS, it's something I've been
able to do since Civ1 days. And I don't like it, it becomes a micro-
management race. Can I manage all my 200 cities and 100 active units
faster than my opponent can manage his?

My challenge against the AI is to win using a given strategy, rather
than to beat it using a known sledgehammer. Viz, using the planet
strategy as the Hive in SMAC is hard work, while if all you want is to
beat the AI in SMAC Hive is ideal, just ICS and you'll win every time.

> Some of us enjoy the experience of building a civilization.

It's why I play. That's also why I play Gaia in SMAC and have changed
the control file to make forests and their associated buildings very
expensive. Otherwise it's just silly.

It might be good to have a random cost plus an increasing component
for diplomacy attempts perhaps: the cost of (eg) subverting a unit is
set the first time you try, as requiring say 53 gold, and goes up each
time you fail (by either 10 gold, or 10%, pick one), but down each
turn you don't make the attempt. Maybe.

Reiner Post said: 
> A low timeout favours predictable, steady expansion and 
> 'steamroller' methods of attack.

So add morale? After your first unit loses the next one is 20% less
likely to win, and so on... I also dislike timeouts because they
favour those things.

Moz